Toward A Logical Theory Of Fairness and Bias

Abstract Fairness in machine learning is of considerable interest in recent years owing to the propensity of algorithms trained on historical data to amplify and perpetuate historical biases. In this paper, we argue for a formal reconstruction of fairness definitions, not so much to replace existing definitions but to ground their application in an epistemic setting and allow for rich environmental modeling. Consequently we look into three notions: fairness through unawareness, demographic parity and counterfactual fairness, and formalize these in the epistemic situation calculus.